World Wide Words -- 09 Dec 06
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Dec 8 17:27:50 UTC 2006
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 516 Saturday 9 December 2006
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Sent each Saturday to at least 45,000 subscribers by e-mail and RSS
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448
http://www.worldwidewords.org US advisory editor: Julane Marx
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A formatted version of this newsletter is available
online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/nchd.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Vilipend.
3. Recently noted.
4. Q&A: Tinny.
5. Q&A: Faggot.
A. Subscription information.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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SCRAN Following last week's piece, John Davies updated me on one
sense of this word: "'Scran' in the Royal Navy is indeed sometimes
used for food but more often it has its Icelandic meaning of scraps
or rubbish. In particular, the place where lower-deck lost property
is kept is called 'the scran bag'." This seems to be a development
of the sense I mentioned, of a bag to hold gleanings of food.
THE OPERA AIN'T OVER TILL THE FAT LADY SINGS Many subscribers told
me that they had come across the expression earlier than the 1976
date of the first written reference. This is not at all unlikely,
since the printed record is often poor for slang or colloquialisms.
Surprisingly, several claim to recall it from here in the UK in the
middle 1970s, sometimes linked to a running gag in an episode of
the Morecambe and Wise Show in which a large soprano is kept from
performing until right at the end of the show. Eileen Macoll has
clear memories of it being used by the late Sam Shulman, owner of
the Seattle Supersonics Basketball team, who used it in the closing
days of the 1971-72 season as the team tried to make the play-offs.
She remembers it being widely reported in the local press at the
time. Unfortunately, the newspaper archive I subscribe to doesn't
include either of the Seattle titles.
2. Weird Words: Vilipend
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To regard as worthless or of little value; to despise or vilify.
Etymologically speaking, to define "vilipend" using "vilify" is to
commit a tautology, since both derive from Latin "vilis", vile or
worthless, which is also obviously enough the source of English
"vile". "Vilipend" also includes the verb "pendere", to weigh or
estimate. To vilipend is to weigh somebody in the balance and find
them not worth considering.
It appeared in English in the fifteenth century and was a popular
term right down into the nineteenth, though it has since dropped
out of sight. In 1771 Tobias Smollett put it into the mouth of a
character in Humphry Clinker: "I would not willingly vilipend any
Christian, if, peradventure, he deserveth that epithet". Sir Walter
Scott employed it in Waverley in 1814: "He became a gay visitor,
and such a reveller, that in process of time he was observed to
vilipend the modest fare which had at first been esteemed a banquet
by his hungry appetite, and thereby highly displeased my wife."
If you would like an obscure deprecatory term and for some reason
"calumniatory" and "contumelious" don't meet your needs, you could
do worse than the related word "vilipenditory".
3. Recently noted
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CHIP ON ONE'S SHOULDER The usual explanation for this saying is
that at one time there was a convention in the US by which someone
spoiling for a fight issued a challenge by putting a chip of wood
on his shoulder. If the other party knocked it off, the challenge
was accepted. Until now, this explanation has been based solely on
a report in the Long Island Telegraph for 20 May 1830, which has
made word historians a bit uneasy. I've now found corroboration in
The Onondaga Standard of Syracuse, New York, dated 8 December that
year: "'He waylay me' said I, 'the mean sneaking fellow - I am only
afraid that he will sue me for damages. Oh! if I only could get him
to knock a chip off my shoulder, and so get round the law, I would
give him one of the soundest thrashings he ever had.'" For more on
the phrase, see http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-chi1.htm .
TERMINOLOGICAL CONFUSION It's hardly known now that "chauffeur",
in French and English, briefly meant any driver of a motor vehicle,
not especially one who is paid to drive for another. The emerging
field of motoring at the end of the nineteenth century was confused
over what to call the machines and those who operated them, as a
letter of 1898 to the Daily Telegraph from Paris makes clear: "The
Duchess d'Uzes has passed a successful examination as a driver of
automotors. The phrase chauffeur or chauffeuse, or stoker, used to
designate the propellers of horseless vehicles is strongly objected
to by a leading member of the Automobile club, who recommends the
American term motorman, with its variation for the other gender."
The letter goes on to note, presciently, that "[a]ccording to those
who are supposed to know, automobilism is now fast supplanting the
bicycle craze, and in a very few years the horseless vehicle will
replace the ordinary cab in the Paris streets."
4. Q&A: Tinny
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Q. Over drinks the other night, a colleague mentioned how one of
our number always wins the raffle, calling him "tinny". Several at
the table had never heard the word before, which surprised me. My
mother, a co-worker's father and another co-worker's grandmother
all used it quite commonly. The theories we came up with were that
it may be to do with helmets in war (not getting shot!), collecting
money in a tin, something mining related, or possibly to do with
roofing tiles. Probably all of these are wrong, but we're hoping
you can help us! [Glenda Millgate, Canberra, Australia]
A. You're correct. All of these are wrong.
"Tinny" was once common in both Australia and New Zealand and I'm a
bit surprised to hear that it has fallen so far out of use. As it
happens, the first example recorded in print is from New Zealand,
in the Chronicle of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force of 1918:
"Remarks are heard on the 'tinny' luck or otherwise of the [poker]
players while the 'stiffs' bemoan their luck." A comment in a book
by Eric Partridge two decades later asserts that it was First World
War soldiers' slang.
Both the Oxford Australian Dictionary and the Oxford New Zealand
Dictionary say the origin is the earlier slang "tin" for money.
This is known from 1836. The Oxford English Dictionary notes, "Said
to have been first applied to the small silver coins of the 18th
century, which before their recall in 1817 were often worn quite
smooth without trace of any device, so as to resemble pieces of
tin." Part of the stimulus for inventing it may have been the even
older "brass" for money, which is known from the sixteenth century.
Various compounds of "tin" appear in the record earlier than
"tinny". The Bulletin of Sydney noted in 1898 that a "tin back" is
"a party who's remarkable for luck". Much later, "tin-arsed"
appears as a term for a person who is remarkably lucky. This has
puzzled some writers, who don't see the historical link with the
money sense of "tin", and have suggested it means somebody who is
well protected in the fundament by a metal sheet so a kick there
doesn't cause any pain. The variant "tin bum" is known in New
Zealand.
5. Q&A: Faggot
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Q. With the word "faggot" turning up on BBC Radio One recently, I
was wondering when it crossed the Atlantic. Is there a definitive
etymology for its pejorative usage meaning 'male homosexual'? An
urban myth says it's associated with the faggots that were used to
burn people at the stake, which seems unlikely in the extreme given
a 400-year hiatus in the association. Can you provide further
information? [Rehan Kularatne, London]
A. Because it's a puzzling slang term, several suggestions have
been made for where it comes from. The one you quote is common
and popular, since it connects the word directly with its most
ancient sense - one hardly known these days - of a bundle of
twigs, sticks, or small branches bound together for use as fuel.
The word arrived in English via French and Italian from Greek
"phakelos", a bundle.
In the sixteenth century, "faggot" took on associations of being
burnt at the stake as a heretic, especially in the phrase "fire
and faggot". There's also a suggestion, though from after the
period in which heretics were burnt, that it could also refer to
a patch, embroidered with the image of a faggot, that heretics
who had recanted were forced to wear on their sleeves. In recent
times, people have equated or confused this patch with the pink
triangle ones that homosexuals were forced to wear in the Nazi
concentration camps. The problem with trying to link it to the
sense of a bundle is the one you've put your finger on - there's
no evidence that "faggot" was used to mean "homosexual" until it
appeared in the US in 1914 in A Vocabulary of Criminal Slang,
edited by Louis E Jackson and C R Hellyer: "All the fagots
(sissies) will be dressed in drag at the ball tonight."
The word has also been linked to the Yiddish "faygele", a little
bird, another US slang term with the same sense; with "fag" in
the British public-school meaning of a younger boy performing
menial tasks for a senior, which sometimes included homosexual
acts; and with "fag" in the British sense of a cigarette, since
around the end of the nineteenth century real men smoked cigars
while cigarettes were preferred by women (and by implication by
effeminate men); the usage "fag end" for a cigarette butt is also
pointed to as a contributory reference. None of these survives an
examination of the evidence.
It's much more likely that it comes from a term of abuse - known
from the early eighteenth century - for a shrewish, bad-tempered or
offensive woman, often as "old faggot" or "silly old faggot". This
usage survived well into the twentieth century, until it was eased
out by the homosexual sense, still to be heard, for example, on
British television shows and films into the 1970s. It turns up, to
take just one case, in a story by Richard Barham dating from the
1870s: "The Baron started: 'What's that you say, you old faggot?'
He ran round by his horse's tail; The woman was gone!" Its origin
lay in the bundle of sticks sense - such a woman was regard as a
burden, a "baggage" (a related derogatory term that goes back to
Shakespeare's time).
The homosexual sense began to appear in Britain in the 1960s, to
judge from a comment in the New Statesman in March 1966: "The
American word 'faggot' is making advances here over our own more
humane 'queer'."
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